Contests for design ideas

[gossymer]

Title
Contests for design ideas

Short, concise description of the idea
Contests to generate designs for livejournal. These could be with or without monetary prizes. So, rather than just asking people for feedback on lj designs, the community could contribute ideas in the form of layouts/designs one on photoshop, CSS etc.

Full description of the ideaI

Comments

[worldserpent]

I think it's much more iffy to let people vote on a site scheme, because site schemes are for the entire userbase (that is, technically we're all supposed to be using whatever the default theme is), thusly the avg user may not be in a position to see any fatal flaws in a user designed site scheme. (For example, accessibility) We all use LJ in different ways, so majority rule may not be the best idea.

However, I think it would be a great thing to have more layout styles, since everyone can choose which style they want to use, and people who don't like it don't have to look. ^_^ So I would agree that having a layout contest is a good idea.

[charliemc]

I think the problems would include the time involved for someone who really understands layouts to check submissions for the coding, as opposed to the visible result. Sometimes what looks good has bad code -- which means you get into trouble when an user wants to tweak that layout...

I love having more layouts available, of course, but I think it requires some genuine expertise on the part of the person designing the layout.

[charliemc]

No kidding!

(So we certainly don't need more of the same... smile...)

[azurelunatic]

Because it's not fair to delay the easy-to-approve suggestions when one that requires a little more review (either for is-this-a-duplicate or other reasons) comes along.

[azurelunatic]

The timing is more accurately three weeks after the community went into volunteer maintenance.

My opinions on the layoffs are probably a little too thermonuclear for this community.

[nostariel]

A++ ♥

I've always wanted to see an S2 style designed from the ground up with accessibility in mind (skiplinks, etc.), and there are some pretty LJ site skins over at userstyles.org already, and new CSS layouts are always welcome...

[lanthirel]

Why not just keep Xcolibur and Dystopia updated? Many people still use those site schemes because they dislike Horizon or Vertigo. The former were given to LJ by Six Apart. The former still say "LJ" to me and many others.

It would be nice if the current layout schemes had a way to just put in a header without having to code it. (Not speaking of Expressive, of course.)